Hey guys...

Just finished up a new pc with a MSI motherboard (K8M890 chipset) with a WD sata hard drive.

All of the hardware appears to be functioning properly, and the hard drive is present in BIOS. When trying to load Windows XP I receive an error - no hard drive found. This is immediately upon installation, I do not get the option to choose a drive,partition,etc...

I'm assuming that I need to load the drivers from the MSI cd, but its not bootable. So how can I do that without first loading an OS? I read similar topics on this board, but most ended with 'load the sata drivers.' Shouldn't my MSI disc be bootable? Or am I overlooking something?

I should mention that this is my first sata hd install, but power and sata cables are connected and as I mentioned the drive is present in BIOS.

Any other information needed please let me know. Thanks in advance for your help!

for most SATA or RAID installs of XP, even in this day and age, you must use a floppy disk with the drivers (.inf?) for your motherboard. I had to buy a floppy disk drive just for this reason but they are cheap so meh

Really... well, I'll give that a shot. Guess I just need to find where I can d/l the drivers, because the mobo only came with a cd. Then get a floppy drive too. Can't believe this is such a common problem! Thanks for your help though.

But if there are any other easier suggestions, I'm still all ears!

the drivers might be on the cd and you may just need to copy them to disk(s)

You hit F6. It should say something like "hit f6 to install RAID or SCSI drivers" (SATA wasnt invented when XP came out)

Ok... didn't think of that.

Thanks again!

hi. i just bought a msi 1719 laptop with a samsung 160 gb sata drive. i could not load xp as it failed to recognise the drive, even though the bios had detected the drive. if i need to install vista do i need to install the driver for the sata disk or will vista recognise it ? i do not have any floppy drive, so i will need to pick up a usb floppy drive. can i install the sata drivers from there for xp?

thanks

Vista has much better SATA support than XP. It didnt ask me for a disk when i installed it on my SATA system whereas XP did.

A usb floppy might work for xp

Your advice is good, jbennet, and I can confirm that a USB floppy will do the trick -- but have it plugged in before you start up the PC.

Chuck

I tried the USB floppy out on my thinkpad (circa 2000) for installing Win2k. In my case i had to go into the BIOS and enable "Legacy Floppy Support" beacuse otherwise the floppy went to E:\ like a USB key instead of A:\ which was where windows expected it

On Vista you can use a USB key or CD-R i think